How a 1990s radio quiz helped the Wallabies celebrate their 1000th player

Sometime on Saturday evening in Townsville, Massimo De Lutiis will be presented with a Test cap in the Wallabies’ dressing room. Like cricket’s Baggy Green, the old-style cap will be green, with gold trim, and the number “1000” will be embroidered on the side.

That will be De Lutiis’ Wallaby number (pending his almost-certain entry into the game from the bench), and the presentation will be made by Rugby Australia president – and Wallaby No. 774 – Nathan Sharpe. RA boss Phil Waugh, Wallaby No. 766, will also be in the room.

It will be a special moment for De Lutiis, a Gold Coast-raised prop with Italian and Irish heritage. But the debut of the 1000th man to play in a Test for Australia in rugby union will also provide a moment for reflection for all other Wallabies, past and present.

“It gives you a perspective of how special it is to be one of the 1000,” Wallabies prop Angus Bell said this week.

What is less appreciated, though, is how we even know De Lutiis will be Wallaby No. 1000, and that Paddy Carew was No. 1, and where Sharpe, Waugh and 996 other players also sit on that list. It turns out this knowledge owes to a Sydney stockbroker who was stumped on a radio quiz show in the early 1990s.

Matthew Alvarez has been Rugby Australia’s honorary statistician for a long time, but 33 years ago, he was a sports nut competing in a team on Tracey Holmes’ sports trivia quiz on ABC Grandstand radio.

“We got asked a question about who was Australia’s most capped front-row forward,” Alvarez recalls.

“At the time, I didn’t know, and I didn’t know where to find the answer. And it was not easy to find. But that triggered the journey.”

For the record, the answer (then) was Andy McIntyre; now it is James Slipper.

But the murkiness of the Wallabies’ historical record launched Alvarez on a mission. He set out to produce a definitive list of all Wallabies players, in exact order, from the first Test in 1899, containing debut dates, game stats and as much biographical detail as possible.

It would take him a decade to complete.

“The difficult thing was being sure enough of the history for the first 100 years to not get to a point where I’d miss somebody, and therefore every other number was wrong,” Alvarez said.

Alvarez trawled through published books and yearbooks on the topic, but finding errors, he painstakingly cross-referenced every Test with available information in libraries, newspaper archives, videos and other historical records.

“It was going back through to ensure we had all replacements, and anyone who was capped, and then to go through in an orderly manner and number them from the start, as per what had been done with Australian cricket, whereby they started alphabetically,” Alvarez said.

“Their game had been going before ours, so that was a simple benchmark to then number ours accordingly, rather than trying to give it to whoever was wearing jersey No. 1. That was too complicated, because jersey numbering has changed significantly over the years.”

So Carew was designated Wallaby No. 1, out of all the players in the first side in 1899 which beat the British Isles 13-3 at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

“It took almost 10 good years from the time I started to get to the point where I was comfortable putting the numbers to everyone,” Alvarez said.

The complete Wallaby list was first published in Inside Rugby magazine in 2002 (with Dan Vickerman the most recent Wallaby at the time, No. 777). It was later embraced by the Australian Rugby Union as the official list. All the Wallaby player numbers for new players – and retrospectively to those who’d come before – are based on Alvarez’s master document.

The rules were (and are) simple: you become a capped Wallaby when you run on the field in a Test, and your number is based on alphabetical order if you run on at the same time as another debutant, be it in a starting XV or in a group of substitutes. Figuring out the order of substitutes was sometimes tricky, particularly for those games with limited records and/or video.

Wallaby numbers are now entrenched in the game, and are referenced heavily by the Wallabies and the Classic Wallabies. They are cherished by players, a number of whom have tattoos, safely due to Alvarez’s diligence.

But most have no idea that the Wallaby number concept is relatively new.

That includes former Test centre Adam Ashley-Cooper, who is a former milestone man as Wallaby No. 800. The “centurions” provide a nice snapshot of Wallabies history, and four are living: Chris “Buddha” Handy was 600 in 1978, Peter Jorgensen (700 in 1992), Ashley-Cooper and Sefa Naivalu (900 in 2017).

Ashley-Cooper’s manic debut in 2005 is almost folklore.

The young centre from the NSW Central Coast was travelling with the Wallabies as a development player when he was named as an emergency reserve for a Test against South Africa in Perth.

When Elton Flatley lost vision in the warm-up, Ashley-Cooper (AAC) was rushed out of the stands to get a jersey and boots and join the bench. The after-dinner story goes that AAC had downed a pie and a beer already, and he adds another pie and beer with each telling.

Wearing a jersey without a number, he became Wallaby No. 800 with a few minutes on the field at the end of the Test, when Clyde Rathbone went down with a “cork”.

“That was the code among players back in the day,” Ashley-Cooper said. “You did what you could to get a debutant on. I did the same for two blokes later on in my career: Ben Tapuai and Pat McCabe.”

Ashley-Cooper had to borrow the suit of assistant coach Scott Wisemantel to receive his Test cap post-match.

“I was thinking, ‘What the f— just happened?’ – it was such a whirlwind,” he said.

Ashley-Cooper’s debut even became a trivia question on a Tooheys bottle cap, which his father Tony proudly showed him a few years later. Who is the only Wallaby to debut without a number on his back?

“He goes, ‘You’ve made it’, and I’m like, “Mate, I’ve played over 50 games for the Wallabies’, and he says, ‘This is my proudest moment!’,” Ashley-Cooper says with a laugh.

Ashley-Cooper played 121 Tests for the Wallabies, a rarity for all the centurion milestone men. Most only played a handful.

But that, too, is consistent with Alvarez’s data. The average Test tally for a Wallaby over 127 years is 13 Tests, and even that’s been inflated by an explosion of Tests in the professional era. Before 1996, the average was eight Tests.

“More than 18 per cent of all Wallabies (185) have only played one test,” Alvarez notes. “And more than 40 per cent have played three or fewer tests.”

The average career lasts for 2½ years, and the 1920s, when rugby was rebuilding after a war that took the lives of 500 Australian rugby players, was the decade with the most debutants, at 121.

In 126 years and 717 Test matches, the average age of all Wallabies debutants has been 23.8.

De Lutiis is ahead of the curve, at 22, and his career length is yet to be determined.

But one thing seems certain: you can bank on Massimo De Lutiis, Wallaby No. 1000, being the answer to a trivia question.

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